Our Story

Our Story: Championing Individual Liberty Before It Was In Vogue

The year was 1956. Barely ten years after India won independence from colonial powers the country had all but surrendered to the Nehruvian consensus.

One group of freedom fighters and patriots, including C Rajagopalachari, better known as "Rajaji" , became increasingly disillusioned by Pandit Nehru’s steering of India towards becoming a socialist state.

Rajaji, who Gandhiji referred to as the “keeper of my conscience” was the country’s first Indian head of state as the last Governor-General between 1948 and 1950, a freedom fighter, and a staunch patriot. He emerged as a beacon of hope for the Indian right-of-centre and his ideas represented the re-ignition of classic liberalism in new India.

It is in this setting, under Rajaji’s patronage, that Swarajya was launched in 1956 by journalist Khasa Subba Rau, an inspiring figure in his own right. His ethical clarity, intellectual honesty, and the ability to speak truth to power, accentuated his reputation as a bold journalist.

Despite the odds stacked against it, and long before it became fashionable, Swarajya championed individual liberty, private enterprise, minimal state and cultural rootedness. The magazine represented the first fierce and coherent intellectual response to Nehruvian socialism.

Our customary salutation “Dear Reader” is an eponymous tribute to Rajaji’s popular column in Swarajya which became his prime instrument for a sustained critique of “permit-licence-quota raj", a phrase coined by Rajaji himself.

Explaining Swarajya`s mission in its early days, Rajaji wrote:"There is before the country the great problem of how to secure welfare without surrendering the individual to be swallowed up by the state, how to get the best return for the taxes the people pay and how to preserve spiritual values while working for better material standards of life. This journal will serve all these purposes."

The Second Coming

The Second Coming: Real Swarajya And Cultural Resurgence

Almost seven decades since Swarajya’s first reckoning, India has at long last begun to unshackle itself from the “permit-licence-quota raj" and finally seems to be moving, unapologetically, towards freedom of enterprise.

But, in many ways, the battles that Rajaji and Rau fought continue to be extremely relevant. While the polity and economy are seemingly moving forward, the Indian mind continues to subscribe to ideas that are many times not grounded in real historical fact, and were in fact manufactured by invaders and colonialists to suit their own narrative.

For close to a millennia, the Indian psyche has been boxed in and effectively rewired. Even post independence, instead of liberation, Indians faced a continued colonisation of the mind through media, academia and polity, most all still controlled – directly or indirectly – by former invaders and colonial powers.

The voices that were conscious of the original Indian genius, and the ‘progrom’ of intellectual colonial boxing-in were suppressed or ignored.

Swarajya seeks to undo this subjugation of the Indian psyche. It seeks to rearticulate the ancient genius of the Indian mind, and speak for the modern Indian who is deeply rooted in our civilisational culture, while also relentlessly seeking to move it forward in the quest for the Indian Renaissance.

In our opinion, without an Indian cultural renaissance the full potential of India’s polity and economy will never be achieved. The free, probing, and inquisitive Indian mind is a far more superior force when it is in consonance with the original wisdom of this ancient land.

The Churn Of Renaissance

Our Editorial Outlook